Hurrah! Carly Fiorina and Meg Whitman lose!

By Richi Jennings. November 3, 2010.

Ding! Dong! The wicked witches are dead. Carly Fiorina and Meg Whitman have gone where the goblins go, and conceded defeat in the mid-term elections. I say: good. This is not a political opinion, though; just plain old common sense, as you'd expect in The Long View...

As I said back in June -- when the GOP selected them -- they both had terrible business track records, yet their messages dripped heavy with talk of business acumen and financial success.

Carly Fiorina was a near-disaster for HP. During the six years of her tenure, she destroyed shareholder value, as a chart of HP's stock price vs. the three major U.S. indexes clearly illustrates:

[Full disclosure: I was an HP employee during her first three years at the company.]

Meg Whitman's eBay and PayPal together managed to pull of the stellar feat of alienating both its sellers and buyers. Its ludicrous and inscrutable policies turned a once-great service into an object of derision and anger. And then there's eBay's disastrous Skype acquisition.

For more on why I think they both deserved to lose, click through to my earlier article.

Of course, the abject failure of these two highly-funded campaigns is in stark contrast to Republican gains elsewhere.

Politically, I'm no liberal. But this is a victory for common sense from Californian voters. How could failed businesspeople possibly be good choices to rescue a state and a nation in financial trouble?

 
Am I right, or am I full of it? Leave a comment below...
 

Richi Jennings is an independent analyst/consultant, specializing in blogging, email, and security. A cross-functional IT geek since 1985, you can follow him as @richi on Twitter, pretend to be richij's friend on Facebook, or just use good old email: TLV@richij.com.

You can also read Richi's full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.

[Updated 7.55am EDT to clarify that the results are as yet unofficial]
[Updated 2.45pm after both conceded]